Monday, February 13, 2006

Cheney's "Hunting" and Political Poses

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/

Everyone knows by now that Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a fellow hunter during a quail hunt in Texas over the weekend. No big deal there, it's a risk you take and no one is going to suggest it was anything but an accident. But the fact this was not real hunting but a "canned hunt", where farm-raised game are released as little more than targets for lazy "sportsmen" to kill. These farm-raised animals aren't even afraid of humans, having been raised by them, so they just sit there while you kill them. According to this letter, 500 pheasants were released on this ranch in Texas for Cheney's 10-person hunting group to kill and they killed 417 of them. That alone tells you this isn't sound sport, it's just a slaughter, a place for rich faux-hunters to get off while killing things. That's just pathetic.

And as Ed Darrell notes in a comment at Pharyngula, it's not the first time this gang has had a staged hunting trip that ended badly: Back in in the early 90s, Bush was fined for killing a protected bird during a staged dove hunt/photo op:

The Bush/killdeer incident was when he was running against Ann Richards for governor of Texas. Richards is a lifetime hunter, and it was beginning to look in the papers as though she was more "macho" than George. So Rove set up a dove hunting trip for Bush. Bush promptly mistook a killdeer for a dove and killed it.I guess we can put Bush the Hunter and Cheney the Hunter on the strike-a-pose wall next to Bush the Rancher (I love it when they show the President out "clearing brush" after his aides bring in some brush for him to clear). It's as funny as watching Al Gore, third or fourth generation scion from one of America's wealthiest and most powerful political families go toe to toe with Bush, who fits in the same category, in 2000 trying to out Bubba one another to prove they're just common folk like us.